Story Runner Guide
As a StoryRunner there are three basic types of RP you might get involved in. The first is personalised RP, this is when either because you were asked or on your own initiative you decide to get involved in someone's personal story, to play NPCs from their history or related to their current position. It's a pretty cool way to make character's histories matter and make their actions feel like they have consequences.
The second is general room scenes, where you just pop into a room, get your votes and start doing your thing. There are several uses for this sort of RP, namely ambience, realism, introductions and excitement.
Ambience means simply emoting for NPCs and background activity to make the world feel more alive and real for the players. While often overlooked it can do a lot to help players feeling of immersion. Ambience can often be added to from outside the room if you have enough trust to spy on people and send them messages.
Realism is similar to ambience but refers to making the situation reflect the reality of the inferno world. For instance this is a world where this is a lot of paranoid, hostility and fear about supernaturals. Those who're open about being supernatural should meet that fear and hostility. They might be refused service, avoided, asked to leave, subject to harrassment. It might even go so far as to lead to them be attacked by hunters or similar individuals who happen to be nearby.
Other things might be people walking around carrying weapons only, or doing drugs in the middle of a public place. Anything that really breaks the theme and reality of the game you can be there to have the world react as it should to those events. Again his is a very important task to helping make the game world feel like a real place.
Introductions are when you create a situation which will push players together and give them reasons to get to know each other and interact. Causing some sort of crises or problem in which they work together could be one instance, or simply causing events to reveal something about one character. Good players should find reasons to get to know each other themselves, but it never hurts to give them a cool how we met story.
Excitement refers to livening things up, it can be anything from an argument to a demonic attack, while the forces of hell are out there and are usually exciting. More human excitement is also an important part of the setting and shouldn't be neglected. A RP scene involving a fire spreading through a building and tasking players to escape the flames and rescue others can be incredibly gripping. Exciting RP should involve some sort of challenge for the players to overcome, a challenge that they have a legitimate chance of failing.
The third type of RP is of course stories. Stories are usually a bit more elaborate and have a bit more of a set up to them. All stories should involve contact stats in some way and preference should always be given to those with contact stats. This is the purpose of those stats, to know about things going on and it's unfair to players who've spent points in them if they don't get an edge in getting involved. The best way to start a story event or organize them is generally with the calendar.
Stories are built out of challenges, a simple one might have a single challenge like beat this monster. A more elaborate one might have a sequence of challenges or even branches. An example might be a story which involves a group having to penetrate the defenses of a facility to kill the evil vampire who runs it. This may branch depending on the group's strategy, if they choose stealth it may lead to different challenges and story arc than if they go in all guns blazing.
All challenges should have a real chance at failure, why does this matter? It's important for the drama of a scene that players feel like they *might* fail, it's that which makes their successes sweet and gets them involved in what they're doing. Without the chance for failure, success is meaningless. And in order to make players feel like they might fail, sometimes it has to actually happen. Additionally players should feel like their choices matter, if any choice I make which isn't completely stupid will lead to the same result, those choices don't have much impact anymore.
That said, there are different types of failure, failure and success don't have to be hard, they can also be soft. A soft failure is one that allows the player to continue and proceed but at increased cost. It might take more time, hurt their char or their pride, cost them money or other resources etc.
To return to the example of the players trying to get inside a secure facility, they choose to attack the main gates. You know this isn't going to work, they haven't scouted well enough to know but the facility has a small army inside it. Rather than have them be killed or driven off and unable to get inside however, a hard failure. You opt to have them be capture, and locked up in the basement. The players then after some time break out of their cell and are now inside the facility and able to progress to the next stage, heading for the boss. However they're injured, it took longer and they should feel a bit silly about themselves for getting captured. This is a soft fail.
The culmination of the story probably should use a hard fail option, but soft fails can be invaluable in the lead up to that climax. Allowing the player's choices to matter, but still ensuring they make it more or less through the whole story.
Soft successes are another option that is very useful, say my players get to the evil vampire and try to kill him, but I don't want him to die yet because I have plans for other stuff he's going to do down the line. Instead of them just failing to kill him, which is basically a fail, I can use a soft success. For instance he gets away but he's injured and his facility gets destroyed, saving dozens of people. In this way the player's successes are still rewarded, while allowing me to have my villain escape.
Mastering soft failures and successes is often the key to achieving a balance between narative and realism that provides the most enjoyable and gripping experiences.
So now you've got through that the question becomes, what are you going to make your story about, so I will go over a brief, non-exhaustive, list of haven antagonists.
Firstly, groups interested in the gate. Various factions groups and individuals are interested in using Haven's proximity to other worlds. Some are doomsday cults looking to bring about the end of days, others sense an advantage to be had. These groups are after all the reason the factions watch over Haven.
Secondly, supernatural hunters. Hunters are a very varied group, some are ex temple or military, some are just random people who decided to hunt monsters, many are from religious extremist groups of many different denominations, others have had those close to them killed by the supernatural or even just hunt them for sport. Hunters are a constant problem for supernaturals, because the law almost never will protect them from them, they also can be a big problem for others as many of them are inexact in their targeting practices, it's not that uncommon for a human Goth to be killed by someone thinking they were a vampire.
Thirdly, the supernaturals. All supernaturals have a darkside, vampires invariably kill the odd victims, werewolves often escape and kill during lunacy, and that's aside from those who just go rogue. Werewolves who embrace their primal savagery, vampires who kill for enjoyment, mages who experiment on people or use their magic to do crime. Shifters who join savage packs, demonborn giving in to their urges, faeborn working an angle... Aside from rogue members many of the factions may come to blows or be drawn into conflict through the actions of their members.
Fourth, bad humans. There's no rule saying only supernaturals can go bad, and no reason why players might not want to get involved using their special knowledge and abilities to help stop a perfectly mundane serial killer or bank robber.
Fifth, fae and gods. The gods don't generally act as antagonists but they are essentially still human so they may. The fae are often interested in playing pranks or cruel tricks on people in the world and can make excellent antagonists.
Sixth, demons. The greatest threat from demons is that of the archdemons. Archdemons are incredibly powerful beings and while trapped in hell they have enough power to reach across the gap and influence things in our world. Archdemons almost always work through vassals. Humans or supernaturals with whom they've struck a bargain, it's within their power to manipulate the world enough to make someone rich, to make the head cheerleader fall in love with them, to cure them of illness, make them immortal or powerful. In exchange they obtain a link with which they can witness the world and snuff out the life of their vassal at their whim.
Vassals are usually empowered by the archdemons, usually with sorcerous abilities as well as other lost talents like fleshforming. They may be given powerful abilities to influence the minds of others, to use destructive magic or to fleshform monsters or loyal footsoldiers, usually using animals as templates.
Every archdemon, like all other demons cares only for causing death, destruction and misery, and the tasks they set their vassals to are always to further these ends. They may be straight forward like building a bomb or unleashing a army of fleshformed monster soldiers, or more subtle like becoming involved in human trafficking, force prostitution, or just running a company that forces it's employees to work 14 hour days.
The ways in which vassals operate is as varied as can be, but their motives are always evil in service to their archdemon. Finding/stopping, and eliminating vassals is one of the most important tasks that players might have to do in order to protect the world.
All six of these antagonists are important and a mixture of all five is crucial to a good RP environment. It may be tempting to make everything about the demon threat but by doing that you're doing your players a disservice, inferno is a whole world, living and breathing. Enemies are not always external and clearly distinguishable as good or bad, terrestrial and morally complex threats also exist, and it's by dealing with all of those that players get to live in this world.